Monday, October 7, 2013

"A journey into the dark heart of Israel's permit regime"

“Trapped between the separation barrier and the
Green Line, Palestinians living in the ‘Seam Zone’ are forced to reckon with a
Kafkaesque permit regime that appears designed to do one thing and one thing
only: make them give up and leave.

Israeli
NGO Hamoked: Center for the Defense of the Individualpublished “The Permit Regime”earlier this year, a report amazing in
its discoveries and the level it details the parallel universe Israel has
created in the “Seam Zone,” the area between the separation barrier and the
Green Line. The bulk of the information in the report was collected from UN
reports (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA) and the
State of Israel’s responses to 76 Supreme Court petitions filed by Hamoked over
the years. As expected, the report gained zero media coverage.

The
following 25 stations, on the journey to the land of permits, were drawn from
the report. Refreshment stations, scattered along the way, were taken from
sources that will be named.”